In my last post, I talked about a major article in this week's Time, "Enemies Unseen," about the four soldiers who were kidnapped and murdered in Kandahar in January, by the Iraqi police they had spent several months training.  That article should have been a cover story but wasn't, which tells me that the Iraq war no longer sells magazines, and I wondered if the American people are suffering a sort of "outrage fatigue," that there are just so many horrors coming out of this White House and this administration and this endless war that people have just gone numb.

And then I read this piece in the Washington Post: "U.S. Widens Push to Use Armed Iraqi Residents"and this quote, in particular, drove me back to the computer like some kind of crazed obsessed madwoman:

Some U.S. officers were not optimistic that the Iraqi government would ever put the local Sunni forces on the payroll.  "Wild success is these guys are being integrated into honest-to-God, badge-holding cops.  That would be a magnificent sign," said one U.S. military officer in Baghdad.  More likely, he said, the American military will "contract them out as little Iraqi Blackwaters to guard their neighborhoods," he said, referring to a private U.S. security contractor.  The worst outcome is that the forces will be actively targeted by the Iraqi government. 

Uh, no.  That's not the worst outcome.

I draw your attention to Exhibit A, ladies and gentleman.  My own MySpace (http://myspace.com/deaniemills) page of photographs--it's actually the second page.  Scroll on down toward the bottom and you will see a photograph of my son in front of the Blackwater Bridge in November of 2004.

If you'll recall, in that year, four Blackwater contractors tried to take a shortcut through Fallujah that resulted in their car being set afire, their bodies being dismembered and dragged through the town, and two of them being hanged from the tiers of the Blackwater Bridge.

In November of '04, the United States army and Marine Corps launched a massive assault on the city, which had become a hotbed of insurgents, and over the course of a week or more of heavy house-by-house combat, wrestled the city back from the insurgents who had taken it over.

My son's unit took back the Blackwater Bridge. 

My son is exceptionally proud of that photograph, which depicts the Texans who served in his platoon, posing with a Texas flag sent to him by a good friend of mine.

Now, the article that aroused my ire does not involve the city of Fallujah, but I could not help but look at it this way:

The U.S. military is hiring, paying, and arming, the same insurgents who tried to kill my son during two deployments.

Now, on the one hand, I can see the necessity of enlisting the aid of Sunnis to help track down and capture or kill the al-Qaeda element of their sect.  I know enough about guerilla warfare and about counterinsurgency tactics to understand that we must sometimes sleep with the enemy in order to win the larger battle.

And I understand that they are doing background checks on these new little contractees, and I understand we're fingerprinting them, and in return, they're showing us weapons caches and IED locations and whatnot.

I also get that the mostly-Shiite Iraqi police is largely using their own badges and governmental authority to hunt down and commit genocide on anyone not-Shiite.

But there are several things that make me very, very uncomfortable about all this.

First, al-Maliki refuses to acknowledge these new recruits or to fund them in any way, because he figures once the Americans leave, they will turn those arms against his government.  He feels so strongly about this that, according to the U.K. Telegraph, he gets into weekly shouting matches with Gen. Petraeus about the program, and has demanded that Bush get rid of Petraeus altogether.

Second, there is absolutely no way to "vet" these people to find out whether or not they have indeed committed acts of violence against American troops.  This is a tribal society--something that took the Bush administration almost five years to figure out--and you cannot penetrate the depths of a tribe.  If 16 people vouch for Ahmed, and blame the other 16 who oppose him because they're from an opposing tribe seeking vengeance for someting, who're you going to believe?

Third, as was pointed out in the Post piece, if a shoot-out starts between these Sunni neighborhood watches, which is what the Americans think they're building, and Shiite police--do we choose sides as to who to back up?

Fourth, as the Time article so tragically pointed out, we can't trust these people.

The soldiers who were kidnapped and murdered in Kandahar had been living with and training those police forces for MONTHS. 

Arming, training, paying.

When the attack came, it was a precision strike.  The attackers knew exactly where in the two-story building the Americans lived, and they knew exactly what procedures the Americans would employ during the course of the battle.  This is why the entire attack lasted only five minutes with devastating effect.

They took the arms we'd given them, and the training, and the inside-knowledge, and used it to kill us.

And we're supposed to think this can't happen again?  That it was an isolated incident?  Or that the Sunnis wouldn't do what the Shiites did?

All I know is that my son and his buddies have been dying and getting attacked by insurgents in the Anbar province for four years.  His unit is due to redeploy there in another month--for a FOURTH deployment.  (Hopefully, he will be out of the Marines by then--if they'll let him go.)

Attacks against Americans are down in the Anbar right now, because of insurgent help finding al Qaeda, and Petraeus will shout that to the rafters in his report to Congress in September as a sign of brilliant success.

I'm sure that the generals who set up the training program in Kandahar were crowing about its success, back in December, too.

These generals HAVE to know that by arming and training Sunnis, they are also actually helping to set up the full-fledged civil war that will break out when we leave.  I realize they have no choice, if they want to catch al Qaeda and prevent further genocide of Sunnis by Shiites.

But to me, this is just insane.

We're not only in the middle of a civil war, but we are getting caught in the crossfire between the sects--with bullets WE PROVIDED.

My tax dollars, going to arm and train the very people who tried to kill my son.

Not only that, but I get to hear about what a big success that plan has been, as his unit heads over for another long grueling gritty and dangerous deployment among scorpions who've just had their stingers upgraded.

The thing is, this is the truth of Bush's War.  We've gotten ourselves so lost in the maze that we are literally meeting ourselves coming and going.  We've turned around backwards and don't know where to go next--we can't even figure out where we've been!  The enemy looks like friends and friends look like enemies.

The generals, who've been ordered to stay in this war by their commander-in-chief or face career suicide, are doing the best they can in an impossible situation, searching desperately for answers the politicians can't seem to find: the blind, being led by the deaf into a mute labyrinthine Hell.